Conferences

The PSA meets at the yearly conferences of the Modern Language Association in December and the American Literature Association in May. The PSA sponsors two panels related to Poe at the American Literature Association Conference in May and has one guaranteed panel at the Modern Language Association Conference in January, with a possible second panel accepted.

Call for Papers for the Fourth International Edgar Allan Poe Conference

Proposals are invited for the Fourth International Edgar Allan Poe Conference to be held in New York City at the Roosevelt Hotel on 45th Street near Madison Avenue (http://www.theroosevelthotel.com/) Thursday, February 26 to Sunday, March 1, 2015. Our PSA-sponsored conferences have been located at cities where Poe lived and worked, and we have been slowly moving up the East Coast from Richmond (1999) to Baltimore (2002) to Philadelphia (2009), and now we will explore Manhattan, where Poe enjoyed fame from his publication of “The Raven” and ownership of a literary magazine, The Broadway Journal.

Possible topics include:

Poe in New York City
Poe’s Reading
Poe’s Influence on American Literature
Poe’s Influence Abroad
Poe Illustration
Poe’s Allusions
Poe and the Culture Wars
Poe and Literary Form
Poe and Women
Poe and Race
Poe and Class
Poe and the Detective Story
Poe and Lyric Poetry
Poe and the Novel
Poe and Science Fiction
Poe and the Gothic
Poe and Humor
Poe and the Visual Arts
Poe and the Performing Arts
Poe and His Contemporaries
Poe and Politics
Poe and Cosmology
Poe as Editor
Poe and the Book Review
Poe and Journalism
Poe and Today’s Students
Poe and His Family
Poe and Childhood
Poe and the Digital Archives
Poe and the Dusty Archives
Poe’s Bankruptcy
Poe and the Performing Arts
Poe’s Correspondence
Poe Scholars
Poe Biographies
Poe Collecting
Poe and Popular Culture
Poe and Comic Books
Poe and the Graphic Novel

CFP: “Rethinking Poe’s Sublime: Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 175 years later,” a Poe Studies Association panel at the 26th Annual American Literature Conference in Boston, MA (May 2015)

Poe abandoned his proposed Tales of the Folio Club sometime after 1835, but still wanted to issue a collected edition of his prose fiction. Dropping the literary club motif, he combined the original tales with additional items from the Southern Literary Messenger. This new collection of 25 stories becameTales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840). What choices informed Poe’s decisions about what to include? To what extent does the term “grotesque”—especially as it relates to Poe’s notions of the sublime—function as a defining characteristic of the two volumes’ contents? Papers are invited on specific tales as well as on Poe’s discussions of the sublime and/or the grotesque in his reviews, miscellaneous writings, and poetic treatises. Other related topics are welcome as well. To submit a proposal, send a title and an abstract of no more than 350 words to: William Engel (wengel@sewanee.edu); in the subject line, put “PSA panel 2015.” The deadline for submissions is January 15, 2015 (panelists will be notified shortly thereafter).

Few American writers have enjoyed the posthumous popularity of Poe, whose works inspire adaptations in various genres such as film and graphic novel while lunchboxes and bobblehead figures commemorate the man himself. Such popularity is a boon for teachers of Poe, who can use movies, comic books, and online videos to help students make sense of a nineteenth-century writer whose stories and poems might seem, at first glance, peculiar and puzzling. Contemporary creative reinterpretations of Poe’s writings also provide insight into how we remove Poe from his antebellum milieu and refashion him to suit our tastes. Studying Poe’s nineteenth-century career, students can discern how popular trends shaped his work, for the example of Poe reveals many ways that writers respond to and shape mass culture. The Poe Studies Association solicits proposals for this pedagogical panel. Possible topics include Poe and contemporary Gothicism; The Raven and Poe biography; Poe’s influence on filmmakers such as Corman and Burton; Poe as rock-and-roll icon; popular images of Poe’s body; nineteenth-century sensation fiction and Poe; Poe and death in antebellum popular culture; Stephen Foster, Poe, and the popular lyric in the nineteenth-century. Other related topics are, of course, welcome. To submit a proposal, send a title and an abstract of no more than 350 words to Travis Montgomery at tdmontgomery2@fhsu.edu. The subject line should read “PSA panel 2015.” The deadline for submissions is January 15, 2015.